LAST week’s article (I spy, with…) elicited a number of interesting responses. One reader revealed that, in the 1960s, he had worked with John Cairncross — the fif­th member of the Cambridge Five. Cair­nc­r­­oss had come to Karachi from FAO in Rome, as part of a Harvard Advisory Group to work with Pakistan’s Planning Commission.

According to my reader, Cairncross “had constructed the persona of a bumbling intellectual”, whereas “he actually had a sharp brain”. “This cover enabled him to get access to all sorts of people who thought him harmless. When he left the Planning Commission to go teach at a university in the United States, he asked all of us not to let his wife (who had been left behind in Rome) know where he had gone. The habit of deception apparently covered not only relations with his country, but also with his family.”

Cairncross had kept his early career as well hidden. In World War II, he was the only Soviet spy “to penetrate the ultra-secret codebreaking and signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency at Bletchley Park”. In 1940, he reported to the Soviet Union that the British planned the production of atomic weapons. Later, he worked for the foreign office, the treasury, for one of Churchill’s........

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